To link to the entire object, paste this link in email, IM or documentTo embed the entire object, paste this HTML in websiteTo link to this page, paste this link in email, IM or documentTo embed this page, paste this HTML in website

Oral History Collection
To read the transcript and listen to the audio of this interview at the same time, first download
the pdf of the transcript by clicking on the link at the top of this screen. The
transcript will open in a separate window. Next, select the option to the right of the
screen.
Special Collections
Musselman Library
Interview with
Frederick Sitzler
Interviewer: Robert Miller
Interview Date: October 23, 2010
0
Robert Miller
History 300
Professor Birkner
11/3/10
Interview with Fred Sitzler
Interviewee: Fred Sitzler
Interviewer: Robert Miller
October 23, 2010
CONTENT
June 10, 1919
Home town: Berlin, Germany
Schooling during WWII: College nearly completed (engineering)
Date of entrance into service: 1938
Job in military: Lieutenant
Important experiences or facts about the interview subject:
- Drafted into 3rd Panzer Division 1938
- Participated in invasions of Poland, France, and Russia
- Married 1942
- Wounded in Russia (concussion caused by indirect grenade blast)
- Moved to America 1949
1
[I interviewed Mr. Fred Sitzler, a member of the 3rd Panzer Division, 6th Regiment during World
War II, about his wartime experiences at his home at 710 Plum Tree Lane in Hanover,
Pennsylvania on Saturday, October 23, 2010.]
Miller: Is there anything you wanted to start with?
Sitzler: No, I just have the dates here and I have the book about the war and I have my book
with the army [Here Mr. Sitzler is referring to a large binder, and his Soldatbuch, an official
record of the engagements in which he participated].
Miller: Wow, very cool.
Sitzler: With all the dates and things, and where I was. They kept track, but in ’44 I got a new
one, and I had to turn that in when I came over here into the army. So they made sure they had
my date on there and everything.
Miller: That makes sense. OK, if you don’t mind I’d just like to start with the earlier stuff. You
said you were from Berlin.
Sitzler: Yeah, I was born in Berlin, I went to school in Berlin, and I was going to go to college in
Berlin after graduating in 1938 but at that time Hitler decided to start a working service and
nobody could study unless he had served the working service. So I was almost nine months in
the working service, digging trenches so we could get more land for raising crops, and then I
hoped to go to college, but they said, “No, you cannot go to college until you do your service in
the army,” so I went into the army. It was about 60 miles north of Berlin. I said I wanted to be in
an anti-tank corps, and when I got my dates when I had to go, they put me in the tank corps.
[Laughs]
Miller: Oh wow.
Sitzler: How do you like that?
2
Miller: That’s sort of ironic, yeah.
Sitzler: So I went to the tank corps and it was a beautiful city, and a nice lake, and I really
enjoyed it there. We had the initial eight weeks of training, running, and doing all the things to
learn what the military’s all about. Since we were a tank corps they needed someone to train the
new guys to work with the tanks, to drive them and to shoot them and all that, and I guess I was
selected and I liked that. I said, “That’s rather what I’d do.” We had five tanks. The little one at
that time was – a Number 1 they called it. We got the crew, and we went out. Now first I had to
give them instructions on how to drive the tank, and then we went out into the fields and we
learned how to do all the things, like when the chain comes off, how we put the chain back on.
We did all the things necessary to work with the tank: put gasoline in there and fix this and that.
Then, the next thing was, we were going down to the shooting range, and they learned how to
load the gun and shoot the gun and do all the maintenance that was necessary. So we had a good
time. We did a lot of driving the tanks through there. It’s a beautiful area up there, north of
Berlin. Everybody enjoyed it, and that’s why they really learned very fast: they really liked it.
And that was my first thing I had to do there.
Miller: OK.
Sitzler: The next thing was in ’39 in September. We got the word that I had to load all our tanks
on a train because they were going to go to Poland for the first war. I was in charge of that and I
had a couple of my guys that helped me. We put all 28 tanks on the train and I went along with
the train, and I guess two others went with the train, and we went to Poland. As we got almost
halfway into Poland, we were unloading the tanks and we were supposed to go in the war. We
had all the tanks off the train and we were ready to ask where we were supposed to go, when the
word came that the war was over, and we had to put them all back on the train again!
3
Miller: Oh wow.
Sitzler: Which was a job, because in Poland they didn’t have the normal ramp where you can
drive them on. We had to make a special ramp and all that, but we got them back on and we went
back home to our [inaudible] or whatever you call it here, to where you were stationed.
Miller: Was your job more to do maintenance on the tanks or did you actually operate any of
them?
Sitzler: Operation. I was training them in everything they needed on the train.
Miller: So the machinery, the equipment.
Sitzler: Yeah, everything was involved.
Miller: OK. Do you mind just, before we get into the war stuff, if I just asked some questions
about before the war?
Sitzler: Yeah.
Miller: OK. So, when you were growing up, you were growing up in Berlin, and this was in the
interwar period, between the wars. What was it like growing up in a major city like Berlin?
Sitzler: Wonderful!
Miller: You enjoyed it?
Sitzler: Yeah. You had everything you wanted. You got big sports there. You got movies. You
got theater. You got everything you could enjoy. We had a lake about, oh, twelve minutes from
the house. In winter we had ice. We could skate. It was a wonderful time.
Miller: That sounds like fun.
Sitzler: Couldn’t be any better. I went to a private school. They called it Rudolf Steiner School,
and they had a special way of teaching not just what’s in the book, but you had to learn – they
taught you a lot of other things. In summertime, we went out to the farmers and we helped them,
4
so we learned what farming is like. We went to companies, manufacturing companies, so we
could see what people had to do there, so we really had an idea of what we were getting into
when we grew up.
Miller: Right, and when you grew up what did you dream of doing?
Sitzler: I was always interested in engineering, from basic [schooling] on. I guess mainly
because I wanted to go to the United States, and I felt that that was what they needed here [in the
U.S.], because the Germans were pretty good in that field.
Robert: Yes.
Sitzler: In developing things. My mother was born in Chicago, and my grandmother told me a
lot of things, so I was ready to go when I was five. [Laughs]
Miller: Oh wow. So you knew from an early age that you wanted to come here.
Sitzler: My father insisted [on staying in Germany, saying:] “You can’t go until you finish
school, and at least college, because college in the States is not good enough. Here you’re getting
a better education, because they not only educate you in college, but some of the time, for three
months, they put you in a company in your field and you work on every machine and
everything.” You have to see that’s going on, and that’s important because if you want to design
something new, you have to know what can be made, and that’s what we really learned there, in
school. Very good. It was really very helpful. I went to different companies, usually in Berlin.
We had the big companies, and we saw a lot.
Miller: So you had a really practical, hands-on sort of education, as well as the academic part.
Sitzler: Yeah, yeah. So that was the school. It was a private school and Hitler determined then,
in ’38, that finishing in a private school was not good enough. You had to go and finish in a state
5
school or whatever you want to call it. So I had to do another half-year in another school to finish
and get my diploma.
Miller: When you were transferred to the public school or state school – I’ve read or heard about
schools after Hitler was made Chancellor, of the curriculum being more geared towards the
political view that they [the Nazis] were trying to push. Was that your experience or not really?
Sitzler: Not really in Berlin. See, it was a last class before you made your finals, and it was
really a lot of that. Now I didn’t have to go to religion; those classes were for whoever wanted to
go, and we really did not have a class. Now that was in ’38. We did not have a class that really
was like what they had later on, the kind of class where they indoctrinate things in the direction
of the Nazis.
Miller: Right. But you were out of school pretty much by this point, or you were further along.
Sitzler: I really didn’t learn anything new there. There were a couple things that were different
in the way you handled some of the things, but for me it wasn’t a problem that half-year. It went
along real fast. I really didn’t learn much there. It was just the time that I had my six months so I
could graduate.
Miller: Makes sense. So this is ’38 you’re talking about.
Sitzler: Yeah. I might want to tell you, I think, that my parents, my family, were strictly against
Hitler’s [inaudible] thing. We had a lot of Jewish friends, and all the high-up people in Berlin, I
think, they didn’t like what they saw, and they tried anything they could do to stop it or hold it
back.
Miller: Well that’s the other thing I was going to ask you was - this would have been around the
time you were growing up – whether you saw or heard people for or against these sort of changes
in government.
6
Sitzler: No I think basically there was just a small crowd that was for him [Hitler], and those
were the ones. Before Hitler there was a bad time, and there was not much work in Germany,
and when Hitler came he had good ideas. He put them to work, like work service, army; he put
everybody to work. There was no unemployment.
Miller: Right.
Sitzler: So everybody that profited from that liked it. Hey, he did a good job.
Miller: Sure.
Sitzler: That’s what it was, but the people that really knew what was going on really didn’t like
it. It’s a little bit like what you have here now, if you have a president that really [pause] moves
in a different direction.
Miller: Sure.
Sitzler: But no one had any idea that he would start a war in ’38. [‘39]
Miller: So there was really no inkling among the population.
Sitzler: It was just unbelievable for us, that it turned around that fast.
Miller: Wow. OK, so it was really just a real surprise that the war started with Poland and
everything.
Sitzler: Yeah, it was a surprise to most people because there was really no reason. It didn’t make
any sense! To us it didn’t make any sense. There was no reason to divide up Poland. There was
no advantage there. Maybe someone thought, oh we have more land, we can employ more
people, but to me and to our family it didn’t make any sense.
Miller: That’s definitely interesting. Just to go back to your experience in the army, you were
saying you were inducted into a tank battalion.
Sitzler: Yeah.
7
Miller: So you had sort of gone into the training. How exactly did you get involved with that?
You had to? It was required?
Sitzler: Yeah. After you have your initial two months of training in the army, you had to decide.
They had many many things you could do. You could go to train other people, learn how to train
other people, you could work with the guns, with regular guns, you could be in charge of the
maintenance, and they would train you in that respect. I think they probably knew I was a real
good driver. I got my driving license at fifteen so I could drive to school and so I had a lot of
experience. I don’t know how much data they had, but they found out that I was the best they
had for training the tanks.
Miller: You were a good driver from an early age?
Sitzler: Yeah.
Miller: If you can tell me a little bit about that that would be interesting.
Sitzler: The school was about sixteen miles away from the house and I had three ways to go: one
by the electric train, one by the bus, one by the subway, and one by the streetcar. But they were
all fifty minutes to get to school. If I took my bicycle, I could do it in fifteen minutes, go the back
way, where they had no trains. It was a shortcut, kind of. So I always went – when the weather
was reasonable – I went to school with the bicycle, and in winter than wasn’t always fun.
Miller: Sure.
Sitzler: So, we had a car all along, and we went to Sweden with the car, and my father always let
me drive. I guess I was eleven or twelve. I had already taken the car out of the garage, and I
learned real quick. So by fifteen, my father said he could arrange that I could make a special test
so that I could get a driver’s license.
Miller: Oh wow.
8
Sitzler: So I got a driver’s license. I was fifteen. Then I could drive to school. I got a little DKW.
I don’t know – it was a plywood car.
Miller: Oh, really?
Sitzler: It was fun. It had a two-cylinder engine in there, a two cycle. It ran real good. You got
good mileage out of it.
Miller: Yeah, I’d imagine so.
Sitzler: Yeah, it was blue. They made it out of plywood, and then they put a cover over it that
was watertight, you know, like [touching the tablecloth], like this stuff here.
Miller: OK, so something to keep the rain off it and everything.
Sitzler: Yeah, it was nice.
Miller: Was it common for children or kids to drive in those days?
Sitzler: No. I guess they had some cases where people that went to school had no other way.
See, we didn’t have [school] buses or anything. You had to walk or take a train or anything. In
Berlin it was good because we had a lot of different ways to go, but to the railroad station I had
fifteen minutes to go. You could almost go with a bike the same time. [Chuckles] Actually the
bus was the closest to go, but that went to the center of the city and then out to the schools, so it
was a long ride. With the streetcar it was basically the same. It was a little shorter, but the
streetcar was much slower than the bus. The subway was ten minutes to go there [to the station],
but it didn’t go directly to school. It went to the zoo, and then I had another ten minutes to walk,
so it wasn’t good either. [Chuckles]
Miller: So the car and the bike were pretty much the quickest way.
Sitzler: That was it, yeah. That was good.
9
Miller: So it makes sense that they put you in the tank corps, because they knew that you had
experience driving.
Sitzler: Yeah, they had all the records I’m sure. I really enjoyed it. It was interesting. It was a
whole different way than driving [a car], because you had sticks for going right and left, and you
had to really watch out because, the first ones – the Number One tanks – if there was a stone or
something, it threw the chain off.
Miller: The chain on the tread?
Sitzler: Yeah. That was a heavy thing you know. It weighed probably 400 pounds or something.
Miller: Wow.
Sitzler: It took a job to put it on, so we had to really learn how to drive so that you don’t get in
any trouble. [Chuckles]
Miller: So they were teaching you how to drive and how to repair them if they broke.
Sitzler: Yeah. Oh yeah. In the army we had nobody special. We had just the driver, and the
loader, and the commander for the tanks, but no special people for service. I guess in the larger
areas there were some, but the company didn’t have anybody, so we had to take care of the tank.
Miller: Just a question I had that I’ve been wondering about: you were a Lieutenant?
Sitzler: Yeah, later on.
Miller: Oh, later on. OK.
Sitzler: Much later on. I guess ’43.
Miller: OK. When we get there that would definitely be an interesting story to learn. But for
right now, you were training with the tanks and you said you went into Poland in September of
’39.
Sitzler: Yeah.
10
Miller: OK. How was that experience? I mean, was your role actually operating the tank in that
action or were you more sort of just helping to load and unload?
Sitzler: I was in charge of loading and unloading, but I had a tank, so if it would have gone into
the war, I would have been in a tank, driving.
Miller: Right, OK. How did it seem when you went it? Did you hear anything from I guess what
would be the front lines? Did it seem like it was an easy thing to do, or did it seem more difficult
– the whole operation?
Sitzler: Driving the tank you mean?
Miller: I guess in general, as a whole. Sorry.
Sitzler: Oh, you’re getting into France now. In Poland we had no action.
Miller: Oh! OK.
Sitzler: We just unloaded them and we loaded them and put them back on.
Miller: And that was pretty much it.
Sitzler: There was no fighting, no shooting, no nothing, but in France we had to go through, you
know, the French had the Maginot Line, defense line, and we had to break through that line and
there was a lot of driving and fighting. It was really interesting. At that time I was the second in
the tank that had to command. On top. I did the communications and the loading of the gun, but
with the commander on top we never did shoot. He was just getting things going. It was real
interesting, because we got to the Maginot Line and we had foot soldiers in front. We came
behind. We were supposed to clean out any spots where the infantry got any shooting from, so
we stopped at one place and the commander told me: “I have to go out and talk to the
commander of the infantry soldiers, foot soldiers, because they have to do a certain thing. They
11
have to go in a certain direction.” So he left. We were sitting there and we were without a
commander. We were not allowed to drive or do anything.
Miller: Right.
Sitzler: And after a while sitting there, I heard that there was some shooting going on, because it
went right over our tank, but you can’t see much on the side window. Way up on the hill there
was a house, a farmer’s house, and I couldn’t see anything else. It didn’t take long before there
came another shot.
Miller: Sorry, is this rifle fire, or is this tanks?
Sitzler: No, no, an anti-tank gun I think.
Miller: Oh wow.
Sitzler: It’s a big three-and-a-half centimeter – that would be an inch-and-a-half.
Miller: Oh wow, OK.
Sitzler: And nothing; I couldn’t see anything, and the next one hit right in the side of the tank,
and on the sides we had the ammunition stored. So what happened was [that] it ignited the
ammunition, and it started burning. So I went out of the way and I found a little hole there I
guess, where a grenade had hit, and I lay in there and watched. I could see out of the second
story of the farmhouse, in the window, that’s where they had the gun shooting at the tank, and it
kept shooting, but there was nothing to do because the tank [had] burned already. [Chuckles]
Miller: Right, so you couldn’t fire back or anything.
Sitzler: But then I decided that this was not a good place and I went back, and from there on I
had no tank.
Miller: So what happened?
12
Sitzler: So we got one of those French little all-terrain, what would you call them? That can go
through all the ditches and things – it was like that. Like a Jeep, you know?
Miller: Sure.
Sitzler: But it was special. It had special wheels in the middle so that you wouldn’t get stuck
over a hill or something like that. It was a real nice car and from then on I followed the company
in that car.
Miller: Because your tank was out of commission.
Sitzler: Once in a while we stopped and we got some salt, and in a store I found a big piece of
cheese and that’s what we ate. We kept going and going and going, but no more fighting. The
French all came up. They all wanted to be taken care of and fed. [Chuckles]
Miller: Right. OK. So that was fairly easy.
Sitzler: There was not more fighting. We went all the way into the South, almost to the
Mediterranean and that was the end of the war [in France]. We stayed there almost a month in
Grenoble, and then I got the charge to load the tanks up for going home. So we had the same
problem [as Poland] again: they didn’t have a good place [to load the tanks onto the trains]. So
we had to build the ramp first and I loaded all the tanks, and we got an engine and it took off. I
had my job done. So I went with a little French car. I went home to the [inaudible].
Miller: So loading the tanks – you’re talking about building ramps. Tell me about that. How did
you build them? What were they made of?
Sitzler: What you had to do was you had to build two areas strong enough so the tanks would
carry on. If you had planks, you know, wood that thick, you probably needed two to three layers
to put them on, but you also had to support them on the bottom, so you had to either put dirt on
there or stone or gravel or something like that, so you could get up to the height [of the train
13
cars]. You could drive the tank all the way through. Once you had them on the first car you could
drive them all the way through.
Miller: Across the cars.
Sitzler: They were long, yeah. Let me see, they had those, what are they called, [unintelligible]
on there. [Holding hands about a foot apart] The cars were only that far apart.
Miller: You could just drive them right on there.
Sitzler: Drive over.
Miller: Had you ever been out of Germany before this? You said you’d been to Sweden?
Sitzler: Oh we were all over the globe, yeah. We summered. My father had off four or five
weeks and we went to another country: Sweden, Norway, Finland, England, a lot of times in
France, to Spain, to Italy, very little to the East. We went never to Poland, but we went to
Greece, Turkey, and Africa, so I learned a lot.
Miller: You were quite well-traveled by this point then.
Sitzler: Yeah.
Miller: What did do that you were able [to travel]?
Sitzler: My father came back from the war, the First World War, and he started law. He got a
place in Berlin under [2nd President of Germany, Paul von] Hindenburg to write the laws for the
country.
Miller: Oh wow.
Sitzler: So I saw him sitting at his desk every day until eleven o’clock, so that’s why I didn’t
want to be a [lawyer]. [Both chuckle]
Miller: Looked like a lot of work, yeah.
14
Sitzler: Desk work! All the time he had to write, desk work, and phone, and that’s what I didn’t
like. I liked to get out and do something.
Miller: You wanted to work more in the field and sort of, hands-on.
Sitzler: Yep, but he did a good job on that [his work]. He got promoted. He was the
Ministerialdirektor, which is right on the top of what you can get before you – all the different
areas, law, police, they all had a boss, that’s where he was.
[At this point, I asked for the spelling of Ministerialdirektor, which Mr. Sitzler provided, before
continuing the interview.]
Sitzler: Yeah, and he had a specialty. He could take care of if they had strikes. When they had a
strike in Germany – at that time, in the ‘30s there were always strikes here and there – he always
had a way to settle them. So they found out here in the United States, and they called him over
here to settle the coal strike.
Miller: Oh wow, really?
Sitzler: So they knew him over here very well, and they worked with him quite a bit, and he was
over here, oh, four or five times, and he never took me along, but my grandmother told me all the
good things about the United States.
Miller: Well you said you [had] wanted to go since you were five.
Sitzler: Yeah.
[At this point in the interview I attempted to clarify which coal strike Mr. Sitzler’s father had
helped to settle. Mr. Sitzler was unsure, but indicated that he thought it occurred during the late
1920s or early 1930s.]
Miller: Well that’s definitely an interesting story. He [Mr. Sitzler’s father] sounds very
successful. Very interesting. Back to the war. You had just come home from France.
15
Sitzler: Yeah, yeah. I came home from France and we had nothing much to do except we got a
new set of tanks – the bigger one, the Number Three – so we had to again learn the maintenance
and the driving and the guns and everything. That’s what we really did in the ‘40s. Now, I got a
special assignment in May of ’41. I didn’t know what it was. They sent me out to the East Sea, to
[inaudible], and nobody said anything [about] what it was. There were probably 40 or 50 people
there, and we had some tanks, but they were old ones – not the real old ones but the second,
Number Two tanks, and what they did there [was that] they made those tanks watertight. They
put special stuff in there, and they put special exhaust in there that could go up.
Miller: Sort of like a snorkel?
Sitzler: And they worked on it. I was there, and I had to drive the tank underwater, and I had to
see if there were leaks or what were problems. It [the tank] didn’t work. [The water was] about
fifteen meters deep and that was all nice sand up there. The East Sea, it’s a nice gradual beach, so
we drove around in there and they fixed everything when there was a problem that had to be
fixed, and after, I guess it was three weeks, we were finished. Later on, I met one of those other
guys that was in charge there, and he told me that they tried to use those watertight tanks to get
into England. Nobody knew, and I guess nobody knows now, but they took some over there – he
didn’t know exactly, two or three tanks – at night and they dropped them close to the English
coast, and they wanted to see if it worked.
Miller: That is really interesting.
Sitzler: It didn’t work, because there’s no sand. It’s all mud and dirt there and all old, you know,
what the people put in, the trash they put in and [it] tears stuff, and the tanks couldn’t even go ten
meters.
Miller: Wow.
16
Sitzler: They were stuck! So [they] had to lift them back up, put them on the ship, and get them
back home.
Miller: Wow.
Sitzler: But I heard. Never saw anything, never anybody talked about it. It was completely
secret. But they used them later on, in Russia, to go through the – you know they had the Tiger
tank.
Miller: Right.
Sitzler: Which was too heavy; it was no good at all. I could have told them that, but they thought
they needed a big tank. Weighed 50 tons unloaded, 60 [with] load, and there was just no bridge
in Russia you could go over.
Miller: They were too heavy.
Sitzler: Then they used it there, for those tanks – to watertight them – so they could go through
the river. Now, they had to make sure they found a place where the sides weren’t too steep so
they could go back up, but they always found a place, and they had quite a few, I guess. 25 or 50
tanks they had there, that could go through and secure the area on the other side, and then you
could get the army and everything through there. Everything else we could get over the bridge,
but first they had to secure it with the tanks.
Miller: Right, and you drove some of these experimental tanks underwater.
Sitzler: Yeah.
Miller: How did you react when they told you you had to drive a tank underwater?
Sitzler: Oh it was interesting. I had to feel that with all that air in the tank, it wouldn’t have
enough weight to really [sink], but it went. On the sand it would go right through. It was good,
17
but no one was supposed to say anything, nobody said anything. It was completely quiet until
they did it in Russia. Then it came out.
Miller: And this special assignment, was there any particular reason, do you know, why you
were chosen for this, or do you not know?
Sitzler: Because I was the – kind of tank expert. All the tanks – they got me sometimes in the
factory, to check things out they were going to do, see if that would be alright, and there was a
lot of construction going on when they made those new tanks, because people wanted to make it
so it’s easy to build. But sometimes that was not the way to do it for the tank to be handy and
drive, so I went there a couple times and talked to them. I think they knew me. That’s why they
sent me out, but they didn’t say anything [about] why they sent me out. [Chuckles]
Miller: [Chuckles] They just sent you.
Sitzler: And I had to sign up, and promise that I would never tell to anybody about what we did
and why we did it.
[Here Mr. Sitzler paused to collect his thoughts, and began to discuss his life after the underwater
tank experiments.]
I wanted to go to college, and I wanted to get off the army, and they told me that now they had a
decision: they needed me, and now they wanted me to make me an officer. I hated that, because
that meant that I was stuck, but they said I had to go, no matter if I said no. You had to go, you
[striking table] must, OK? So it was real interesting. We had the officers’ school in Berlin, and I
really enjoyed it. They made some new, interesting things to learn, and they made some things
that you could use in the war. They gave you instructions to go at night to certain points and
come back, and you had to use those instructions. So they told you, go left one mile to a tree, and
then go along the street, and then there’s a checkpoint. There was a piece of paper, and you could
18
just sign it up, and then the instructions kept on going: go right, go left, go over the bridge and it
told you, but it wasn’t always real easy. So we had those five points, and for me, oh that was
interesting! And I signed all five points, and I got home in, oh, I guess two hours.
Miller: And was that fast?
Sitzler: And you know, there were 60 people in my officers’ class. I was the only one that got all
six points. [Chuckles]
Miller: Wow. Very good.
Sitzler: But that’s why I really enjoyed it. That was interesting, because that was the first time I
had ever had to use written directions that told me certain points to find and go around.
Miller: And so you enjoyed that part of the course?
Sitzler: So that was the last thing I did. I was one degree under-officer then, when I left the
school. [I] went back to the company. At that time they had started the war in Africa, and they
had to get tanks over there, and for some reason they said, “Oh, you’re the expert; we have a
trainload of tanks. You have to get them to Africa.” So I got to where they make the tanks in
Mecklenburg and we loaded them. I had three helpers and we loaded them on the train, which
there was real easy – they had a ramp – and we drove them right on and got two engines, and
went up to the mountains, through the Alps. On top of the Alps, we were supposed to get a third
engine, because there was a lot of braking power going down the mountain. The Italians or
whoever was supposed to do it didn’t get a third engine. I called back and said, “I can’t go. I
don’t have [the engine].” They said, “Forget the third engine! We need the tanks in Africa! Go!”
[Strikes table]
Miller: Wow.
19
So we went down the Alps with two engines, and it was going fast around the curves and faster,
and I was hanging on the outside ready to jump off, on the mountainside in case.
Miller: In case it fell over.
Sitzler: But it was my scariest moment in my whole life! But they made it. I guess the tanks
were heavy enough [that] it stayed on the track. We got down to Napoli [Naples, Italy], and
that’s where we had to load the tanks on the ship, and that was a tough job – took us almost a
week to get them all on. We had to use the crane, and they had to go in the hold, and then you
had to drive them, and then you had to put something on, and then you put a second one [tank]
on top. It was a tough job, you know? They didn’t have enough room there to put them all in.
The ship wasn’t big enough. But we got them on after a week and I thought, “Oh gee, now I can
go home,” because I wanted to get married. We had it all scheduled for December and that’s
when I had that trip, so we couldn’t marry.
Miller: So when exactly did you meet your wife? Was this before the war?
Sitzler: No, it would have been when I came back from France.
Miller: OK.
Sitzler: In ’42.
Miller: And how did that happen? How did you meet her?
Sitzler: Oh, we came back and we made a parade through the town, with the tanks, and all the
girls were throwing flowers off, and my wife was standing on the side, and I had to find out
where she was [from], and she said, “I work in the pharmacy.” So we were “hooked up.”
Miller: Wow, cool, OK. And so now in ’42, you had decided to get married and you had to go
back.
20
Sitzler: Yeah, I had to ask special vacation to get married really, but then came that transport for
the tanks, and that was more important, so we couldn’t marry in December, but I was ready to go
home in December to get married, but my assignment was to get the ships, the tanks, to Africa,
not just load them on the ship. So the ships went out and they had air-alarm, airplanes oben
[over]. They [the ships] went right back in the harbor. They were out at night, and the airplanes,
they came back. It took two-and-a-half weeks before we found one night, where there was
enough cloud and fog that we could get anything over, so I was sitting there [chuckles] wanting
to get married. But, then we had them over and I went back and we got married, I guess, a couple
days later.
Miller: Oh OK, so not too late. That’s good.
Sitzler: It worked out.
Miller: Good. And these airplanes you were talking about –
Sitzler: Yeah, the English fighter planes, oh yeah, they tried to keep it – it was hard to get
anything over there, because the Mediterranean is usually nice weather. Sunshine, blue skies,
you know. There’s no way anybody could go over. They had to do it at night, and they had those
lights on the plane, on the bottom. They could light up and they could really shoot, you know. So
it was not easy. So we got to Italy, yeah. Then I had vacation and I got married. We went to the
mountains and had a wonderful time, in Bregenz [in Austria]. Bregenz is right – it’s on a big
lake, and it’s right on the mountains. It’s a beautiful area.
Miller: Were you there with your wife, or was that for the army, when you were there?
Sitzler: With my wife. For vacation. For the honeymoon vacation.
Miller: Right. OK, well it’s good they let you do that at least.
21
Sitzler: And then, when I got back, they sent me to Russia. I guess this was when they had the
big offensive going on, and the tanks and the company and everything was already down there. I
didn’t have to load them. Someone else took care of it, because I was on vacation, so they sent
me by train to catch up with the company, and I caught them close to the Krim [Crimea, Russia],
which is halfway into Russia. I had five tanks under me, and took care of it. We drove down for,
I guess, three, three-and-half weeks. Every day we drove through Russia. We went over the big
bridge by the Don River, [near] Rostov, and then it was all countryside. Beautiful. There were
fields that were probably 20 miles long, and they had watermelons, and you should have heard
the sound when the tank goes over the watermelons! [Miller chuckles] But, we went through
there. See, down there they have a different way. Nobody has any ground. All they have is a
house, but nothing belongs to them on the ground. And then they have a place somewhere in the
center where they have all their machinery for the fields. So people from everywhere come to the
machinery in the morning, six o’ clock, and go to the field and work on the field, and at four o’
clock, they put the thing back, and they go back home. That’s the way it works, and it works
beautifully because all those fields, they were just beautiful. Everything was in gross [held in
common] and really nice. So we went through all that and the people were all welcoming us.
“Hey, finally we’re rid of the Soviets!” They all hated them down there.
Miller: So they were actually happy [to see the Germans].
Sitzler: Soon as you got past the Don River in the South, they all hated the Soviets, and so they
brought us drinks, and they invited us into the home and they cooked for us. It was really nice.
So we went all the way to the Caucasian Mountains, and there we stopped, because they had to
get ready for going to Stalingrad, and that had to be all organized. So we were there for quite a
while, and they had some army there in the next city, but we had free going on the land, you
22
know? We had our own place there. We had a tank corps there, but I was only taking care of one
company basically. I had a company sent down there. But when it went to loading tanks or doing
something I was in charge of, I was in charge of all the four companies that belonged to a
division. And the Russians had little airplanes I guess, [that] they took away from people that
were rich, and they put some hand grenades in there and they went at night whenever [they] saw
something downstairs, or there were woods – they didn’t have many woods there but they
figured, “oh there’s [some Germans]” – they threw hand grenades down.
Miller: Wow. From the planes.
Sitzler: From the plane, yeah. So we found out and we heard a couple [inaudible] not too far
away, so what we did is, we took the tank and drove it away, and we dug a big hole just wide
enough so the tracks would fit on each side, and we dug it deep enough and put some straw in
there, and some blankets, and drove the tank over, and now we were – at night we were safe. We
slept under the tank. [Chuckles]
Miller: Under the tank, right.
Sitzler: So that was real good. We had a safe place at night and we had a good time at day. It
was wonderful down there. It was beautiful weather and the people were nice, and then some day
we had a guy that took care of the supplies, and, I don’t know, he must have been a little dumb.
He put the gasoline in one of the little Wald – forest strips, you know? They just had small
pieces. He put all the gasoline storage in there.
Miller: Oh wow.
Sitzler: Oh wow. He didn’t know. He didn’t find out until they threw a hand grenade in there
and the whole gasoline [supply] went up.
Miller: Oh man.
23
Sitzler: So we went by horse and buggy.
Miller: Wow. [Both chuckle]
Sitzler: We went for a couple weeks. We went by horse and buggy.
Miller: Because that was – all your gas was blown up.
Sitzler: Yeah, we had to save the little gas that was in the tanks, you know, for getting them
going somewhere. And the next thing was, you know, Stalingrad didn’t work out, and we had to
hurry to load up the trains, [get] the tanks on the train, because otherwise we would have been
cut off. It was a rush! Everybody rushed out, back, and I was in charge of loading. I had a BMW
with a sidecar, so I was pretty handy, and I loaded all the tanks. I had one guy with me for a
while, and I loaded all the tanks with him, and as I had all the tanks in, he went with somebody
else. I guess there was someone else waiting, and he went, and I went with my bicycle with a
sidecar, and the train went off, and I had my job done. So I went back to the Don River across a
big bridge to Rostov. Took quite a while driving with a motorcycle, so [I thought,] “the train
should come pretty soon.” Train didn’t come. Nothing, train didn’t come. Guy came to me and
said, “We have to blow the bridge.” I said, “The train is coming. You can’t blow the bridge.
There’s everything on there, all the tanks and all our stuff.” He said [pounding table], “I have
orders. At three o’ clock, the bridge goes up!” And at three o’ clock, the bridge went up. We had
no tanks. We had no supplies. Nothing. We had just our own – well I had the sidecar. [Chuckles]
Miller: Right, you had that. So was this bridge the way out?
Sitzler: Over the Don River, yeah. Huge river, you know. It’s like here, the Chesapeake Bay
Bridge, you know? It’s a long bridge. And, what happened we found out later on – the Russians
aren’t dumb, they know, “Oh, the train comes with the tanks” – they cut all the water pipes off
that, you know, they have the special things that go to put water in the engine?
24
Miller: Right. Yes.
Sitzler: And they cut all the water lines. So the train got within seven miles of the bridge and ran
out of water.
Miller: Wow, so he couldn’t get there.
Sitzler: That’s what we heard later on. So we were without tanks, so we went back to the
garrison.
Miller: And how organized, generally, was this retreat?
Sitzler: It was really well organized. Everything. The trucks went, and the people went, and
everything. The kitchen. Everything was real organized, and everyone made it, and the tanks
would have made it if – the water. And nobody realized that the Russians would do that, because
we could have probably got [a] couple gallons on the train if we had had any idea! But that was a
surprise. OK, now we are back [from Russia], and I had vacation.
Miller: Where did you spend that?
Sitzler: Oh let me see where we went. We went to the Alps, to Garmish.
[At this point, Mr. Sitzler spent a few minutes clarifying the location of Garmish, Germany, a
town about 40 miles north of Munich in the Bavarian Alps.]
Then I got home, and I got promoted to an officer, and I was sent down there to the S.S. [who]
had trouble with the Tiger Tanks. They were too heavy, and they could not drive them real well,
and if the Tiger Tank threw a chain, they couldn’t put it back on. Either they weren’t trained, or
they – I don’t know what. They didn’t want to – you know, it was usually in the mud, it was a
dirty job, and I guess they weren’t used to that. They had their fancy uniforms, so they sent me to
check that out, and it was tough. They just weren’t strong. They just didn’t want to do dirty
work, and I was supposed to train a special group so that once [the] tank was stuck, the group
25
could go there with a bicycle or motorcycle or something and fix it up. I showed them how to do
it, and it was not easy. You had to lay out the chain, but you had to clean it first. You couldn’t
have all the mud there. Oh, they hated that job! They had to get brushes and clean them out, OK?
And then they had to drive the tank with one chain working, but with the one chain working, the
tank has a tendency to go. So you had to be able to brake to turn it a little bit that way [indicating
the motion of a tank turning with hand signals] and then go a little bit. They couldn’t do that.
Miller: The S.S. couldn’t?
Sitzler: They were not capable! They didn’t have the feel for it you know? And as soon as you
were halfway on the tank and you turned a little bit – too much! It was off again. And I tried, I
tried. I showed them. I drove the tank on there. I had a guy in there with me, and I showed him:
you go a little bit, easy, and then you push so it stays. Didn’t work. So I said I had my job done
and I went back home. [Both chuckle]
Miller: Just going back slightly, you said you were promoted after you came back from Russia.
Sitzler: Yeah.
Miller: And was there a reason for that, or was it just because you’d been to officers’ school?
Sitzler: It was time, you know? In the promotions you go a certain time every year. In the
beginning it’s every year you get promoted. First [you have your] regular soldier, then your
Gefreiter, then your Obergefreiter, your Feldwebel, then your Unteroffizier, then your -
Feldwebel we call it, and then you get Lieutenant you know? [Gefreiter and Obergefreiter are
German military ranks that correspond roughly with the American ranks of Private and Senior
Lance-Corporal respectively. Both Feldwebel and Unteroffizier can be roughly equated with
American sergeants.] So it’s granted – automatically they do it – unless you’re not doing your
job. That’s different.
26
Miller: Sure.
Sitzler: So I got promoted. [Here Mr. Sitzler paused to collect his thoughts, and briefly returned
to his experiences in Russia.] We were there in an area where again they were throwing hand
grenades, and we had the Panzers, the three tanks – I guess they supplied new tanks to it [the
company] – and one morning, we were not even – it was past the Krim, it was close to the front –
and one morning I was in the tank and I guess we were going to go somewhere, and I was
looking around at everybody there, ready to go. Somehow, I guess it must have been a hand
grenade, might have been something else, we never could really say, but it was an explosive that
hit the tank, and the top of the tank where the commander stands has two openings you know?
And it hit under that opening, and the opening flew right on my head, and I was down in the tank
and I was out. I guess not too long, but I was really hit. So they put me on the ambulance, and
they sent me back to Germany, and I went to a hospital in Brieg, which is, oh about, 80 miles
southeast of Berlin [Brzeg, Poland, 150 miles southeast of Berlin]. They had a real hospital, not a
field hospital there.
Miller: How was the hospital?
Sitzler: Oh it was a nice hospital. They had [a] clean, nice hospital, and they took care of me. I
had a concussion, and I had something else. I had some kind of a cold or something. So my wife
visited me there and I guess I was there, in the hospital for three [or] some weeks, in Brieg. That
was in ’43, February of ’43, and at that time they sent me back to the garrison and I did a couple
things there, getting things organized, because they were – they didn’t tell us – but they were
preparing, getting ready for the front in France you know? They already knew that they [the
Allies] were going to come sooner or later. So in fall of ’43, we were all ready. Everything was
27
brought up to date, and packed, and we went over the Rhine River right close to the border line
into – oh it was a nice little town. All the soldiers were put into quarters in private people’s
[properties]. I was in a bakery, and the tanks were all hidden away somewhere, and we stayed
there quite a while. We stayed there. My parents came visiting me, and we stayed there almost –
yeah, I guess until the invasion. I guess they had little advance notice, so about one day or two
days before that, we went into France with the tanks and all the supplies, but I was put in charge
of the supply company. They didn’t have anybody there, and the supply was going to be very
difficult, so they felt that [Sitzler’s] the right guy to do it, and I couldn’t understand. I had
nothing to do with the tanks anymore; I had a supply company, and I had to make sure that the
supplies and the gasoline got to the tanks, and the tanks raced to the invasion front.
Miller: And you said that people were aware this [the invasion] was coming?
Sitzler: Yeah.
Miller: OK.
Sitzler: Yeah, they did. I guess not much. A couple days. They knew it was coming, but the real
– what day they didn’t know until the day before, something like that, you know?
Miller: Had you personally been hearing about things happening? That this might happen?
Sitzler: No, no. We really didn’t know, we [only] had a feeling, because nobody knew where
you [the Americans] were coming, you know? You could come into southern France, you could
come near Holland, you could come into Germany. So nobody really had any idea what was
going to happen, but then the first [German] tanks were about 40 or 50 miles [away]. We sent out
28
the trucks with gasoline and food, and it worked pretty good, but then they were 100 miles, and
we found out we couldn’t send anything out at daytime because there were airplanes all the time.
MIGs going around. So we had to send them at night, but the roads there were not really good.
They were all side roads, you know, and the trucks couldn’t put any lights on, so we had trouble.
They got off the road, and they couldn’t find the drive, and we had trouble getting the supplies,
and the next time it was ever further, so I sent out sixteen trucks, and eleven came back. So we
had trouble getting supplies out. I went out with a jeep and tried to find them, but they got lost,
or they – I don’t know. Maybe they didn’t want to go. You never know. But for the next time,
next night, it was even further were the tanks were. They went out, and four came back.
Miller: Out of the eleven?
Sitzler: [Chuckles in affirmation]
Miller: OK.
Sitzler: So I didn’t know. I couldn’t get more trucks. I couldn’t feed the tanks. Nothing I could
do. I went to Paris, to see if they were at the headquarters, see if we could get any trucks
anywhere or they could confiscate some or what we could do to get supplies for it, and they were
already there, they were already more or less packing up, and they were all disturbed. There was
no organization anymore. Everything went haywire.
Miller: Did they think they were going to be overrun basically?
Sitzler: Yeah, you were in already, probably. They had already found out the defense didn’t
work. You were in. It was only a matter of days, and you were there. The all had packed up and
29
bosses were all gone. So there was nothing I could do. I went home and I didn’t send those three
trucks out anymore. I said, “OK, nothing I can do.” Now the company tanks came back, some of
them. I don’t know why. Maybe because they had no ammunition or they had no gasoline, you
know, something. But, they came back, and we got organized close to the Rhine River. We got
back together there. We had twenty, twenty-two tanks there, and my three trucks, and some other
vehicles, some Lieutenants and some people, and the commander of the division. There was
really nothing to do right there, so I told the commander, “I have my wife in Berlin, and the
Russians are getting close. I have to get out.” So he gave me vacation, and I went to Berlin, and
picked up all the stuff we had there and put in on the train, and we went towards Stuttgart. That’s
where my parents were. We had only one big problem: they had bombed the bridge, and the train
could only go to the bridge, and we had to go to the next station on the other side by car, so we
had to load the car and get out and get to the other station and load the train again. But it worked.
The train took us to Stuttgart, and I unloaded everything, and we got everything to my parents,
and my wife stayed there and I went back to the army. And what happened [was that] it was hard
to get transportation. I went with the train a stretch, but over the Rhine River the bridges
wouldn’t work so I tried to hitchhike. I hitchhiked on the Autobahn and a nice car stopped and
asked me where I wanted to go, and I said, “Oh I want to go to the 3rd Panzer Division. They are
located up there.” And you know, the people in there had an S.S. uniform, and I said, “OK, that’s
OK,” and they said, “OK, we’ll take you there.” I found out in the car in the back there was a
new commander for the 3rd [Panzer] tank division.
Miller: This was an official car?
30
Sitzler: That was an official car, yeah, but it didn’t have a flag or anything on there. So we went
there, and I found a couple of old people from the regiment, and they told me, “Come quick,
come quick! We have all the discharge papers in the garage.” Our commander was discharged,
and they put someone new in there. They didn’t know it was an S.S. guy, but he gave discharge
papers to everybody, to the whole division. So I went to the garage there – it was a barn – and
they had a big stack, and I got my discharge papers and I said, “OK, it’s time to leave,” and went
back to Stuttgart, and that was the end of the fight. The French came first, and they did shoot
down – they were afraid – they did shoot down into the center of Stuttgart, right over our house,
but nothing happened. One hit the tree, and it went down in the ground, but it didn’t explode. We
had to remove it later on. [Chuckles]
Miller: Wow. That must have been kind of scary.
Sitzler: But then Americans came later on and they put big signs on the trees. “Any soldiers
should come down for discharge.” So I went down, and they had captured one of the German
division’s money, German money, and everybody [who] came down for discharge got 100
Marks.
Miller: Wow! [Both chuckle]
Sitzler: And they [the Americans] were real nice, and I guess we talked for a while, and I said,
“I’m ready to go [to America],” and they said, “We can’t take you along yet.”
Miller: So you wanted to go with them back to the United States.
31
Sitzler: Yeah, at least some way to get things going, but no, and my father said “No, you can’t
go. You can’t go over there. The colleges are not good enough. You have to study here.” So I
was going to college. We had a nice technical college in Stuttgart – I think the best one – but the
bombs had disturbed the roof. There was no roof on there.
Miller: Wow, on the school.
Sitzler: On the building, on the school. So they had a good idea. We went out to an old airport
and they had a big hall there, and we disassembled the roof, and put it on a truck, and took it
down to the University, and put it on.
Miller: Wow. The students did this?
Sitzler: It took four months, so I couldn’t start right way, but in November we started college,
and I went to college four years, four terms, but in ’38, I guess, summer of ’38, the Americans
put a notice in the paper that they had opened a place where you could apply for going to the
states. [It was probably closer to 1948. Mr. Sitzler moved to the United States in 1949.] So I
went down and applied, and I was number four there on the list, and that was good, because I got
the papers for going to the States three months before I finished college.
Miller: That’s not bad.
Sitzler: So I finished college in December. We went to Italy, to Genoa, on the ship and went
over to New York.
[Mr. Sitzler then described his experiences in the United States. He had an uncle in Baltimore,
where a fellow German helped Mr. Sitzler to get a job manufacturing tools for aircraft
32
manufacture at Glen L. Martin. After three years he moved to Mechanicsburg and worked for a
man who ran an independent aluminum door and window manufacturing business. Mr. Sitzler
worked in automation, and told an interesting story about an incident in which a reaction in the
smelter caused an explosion. Three-and-a-half years later the company went bankrupt, and Mr.
Sitzler got a job in a tool shop in Harrisburg, which made connecters for IBM. He worked again
in automation and sales. Mr. Sitzler told an interesting story about his boss, who was apparently
a glider pilot, and often flew from Harrisburg to New York; during a glider pilots’ meeting in
Mexico, he suffered from heat stroke and died. Mr. Sitzler did not wish to run the company,
which was sold to DuPont. (The branch went bankrupt in 2004.) Mr. Sitzler worked as a
consultant for DuPont until retirement. During the time Mr. Sitzler discussed these events, I
asked if there was anything else he wanted to say about the pre-1945 period, to which he replied
in the negative. After he concluded his work experiences, I thanked Mr. Sitzler for talking with
me and briefly discussed my academic major and minor with him before shutting off the digital
recorder. Mr. Sitzler then showed me a binder about the war a friend of his had made for him
which consisted of pictures and timelines concerned with Mr. Sitzler’s division. I was also
shown Mr. Sitzler’s 1939 Soldatbuch and a medal earned by Mr. Sitzler’s father during the First
World War. Mr. Sitzler also mentioned, while the recorder was off, that he was on standby
during Operation Walküre, the 1944 plot in which a group of German officers attempted to kill
Adolf Hitler and take control of the German government with the aim of ending Nazi rule.]

Oral History Collection
To read the transcript and listen to the audio of this interview at the same time, first download
the pdf of the transcript by clicking on the link at the top of this screen. The
transcript will open in a separate window. Next, select the option to the right of the
screen.
Special Collections
Musselman Library
Interview with
Frederick Sitzler
Interviewer: Robert Miller
Interview Date: October 23, 2010
0
Robert Miller
History 300
Professor Birkner
11/3/10
Interview with Fred Sitzler
Interviewee: Fred Sitzler
Interviewer: Robert Miller
October 23, 2010
CONTENT
June 10, 1919
Home town: Berlin, Germany
Schooling during WWII: College nearly completed (engineering)
Date of entrance into service: 1938
Job in military: Lieutenant
Important experiences or facts about the interview subject:
- Drafted into 3rd Panzer Division 1938
- Participated in invasions of Poland, France, and Russia
- Married 1942
- Wounded in Russia (concussion caused by indirect grenade blast)
- Moved to America 1949
1
[I interviewed Mr. Fred Sitzler, a member of the 3rd Panzer Division, 6th Regiment during World
War II, about his wartime experiences at his home at 710 Plum Tree Lane in Hanover,
Pennsylvania on Saturday, October 23, 2010.]
Miller: Is there anything you wanted to start with?
Sitzler: No, I just have the dates here and I have the book about the war and I have my book
with the army [Here Mr. Sitzler is referring to a large binder, and his Soldatbuch, an official
record of the engagements in which he participated].
Miller: Wow, very cool.
Sitzler: With all the dates and things, and where I was. They kept track, but in ’44 I got a new
one, and I had to turn that in when I came over here into the army. So they made sure they had
my date on there and everything.
Miller: That makes sense. OK, if you don’t mind I’d just like to start with the earlier stuff. You
said you were from Berlin.
Sitzler: Yeah, I was born in Berlin, I went to school in Berlin, and I was going to go to college in
Berlin after graduating in 1938 but at that time Hitler decided to start a working service and
nobody could study unless he had served the working service. So I was almost nine months in
the working service, digging trenches so we could get more land for raising crops, and then I
hoped to go to college, but they said, “No, you cannot go to college until you do your service in
the army,” so I went into the army. It was about 60 miles north of Berlin. I said I wanted to be in
an anti-tank corps, and when I got my dates when I had to go, they put me in the tank corps.
[Laughs]
Miller: Oh wow.
Sitzler: How do you like that?
2
Miller: That’s sort of ironic, yeah.
Sitzler: So I went to the tank corps and it was a beautiful city, and a nice lake, and I really
enjoyed it there. We had the initial eight weeks of training, running, and doing all the things to
learn what the military’s all about. Since we were a tank corps they needed someone to train the
new guys to work with the tanks, to drive them and to shoot them and all that, and I guess I was
selected and I liked that. I said, “That’s rather what I’d do.” We had five tanks. The little one at
that time was – a Number 1 they called it. We got the crew, and we went out. Now first I had to
give them instructions on how to drive the tank, and then we went out into the fields and we
learned how to do all the things, like when the chain comes off, how we put the chain back on.
We did all the things necessary to work with the tank: put gasoline in there and fix this and that.
Then, the next thing was, we were going down to the shooting range, and they learned how to
load the gun and shoot the gun and do all the maintenance that was necessary. So we had a good
time. We did a lot of driving the tanks through there. It’s a beautiful area up there, north of
Berlin. Everybody enjoyed it, and that’s why they really learned very fast: they really liked it.
And that was my first thing I had to do there.
Miller: OK.
Sitzler: The next thing was in ’39 in September. We got the word that I had to load all our tanks
on a train because they were going to go to Poland for the first war. I was in charge of that and I
had a couple of my guys that helped me. We put all 28 tanks on the train and I went along with
the train, and I guess two others went with the train, and we went to Poland. As we got almost
halfway into Poland, we were unloading the tanks and we were supposed to go in the war. We
had all the tanks off the train and we were ready to ask where we were supposed to go, when the
word came that the war was over, and we had to put them all back on the train again!
3
Miller: Oh wow.
Sitzler: Which was a job, because in Poland they didn’t have the normal ramp where you can
drive them on. We had to make a special ramp and all that, but we got them back on and we went
back home to our [inaudible] or whatever you call it here, to where you were stationed.
Miller: Was your job more to do maintenance on the tanks or did you actually operate any of
them?
Sitzler: Operation. I was training them in everything they needed on the train.
Miller: So the machinery, the equipment.
Sitzler: Yeah, everything was involved.
Miller: OK. Do you mind just, before we get into the war stuff, if I just asked some questions
about before the war?
Sitzler: Yeah.
Miller: OK. So, when you were growing up, you were growing up in Berlin, and this was in the
interwar period, between the wars. What was it like growing up in a major city like Berlin?
Sitzler: Wonderful!
Miller: You enjoyed it?
Sitzler: Yeah. You had everything you wanted. You got big sports there. You got movies. You
got theater. You got everything you could enjoy. We had a lake about, oh, twelve minutes from
the house. In winter we had ice. We could skate. It was a wonderful time.
Miller: That sounds like fun.
Sitzler: Couldn’t be any better. I went to a private school. They called it Rudolf Steiner School,
and they had a special way of teaching not just what’s in the book, but you had to learn – they
taught you a lot of other things. In summertime, we went out to the farmers and we helped them,
4
so we learned what farming is like. We went to companies, manufacturing companies, so we
could see what people had to do there, so we really had an idea of what we were getting into
when we grew up.
Miller: Right, and when you grew up what did you dream of doing?
Sitzler: I was always interested in engineering, from basic [schooling] on. I guess mainly
because I wanted to go to the United States, and I felt that that was what they needed here [in the
U.S.], because the Germans were pretty good in that field.
Robert: Yes.
Sitzler: In developing things. My mother was born in Chicago, and my grandmother told me a
lot of things, so I was ready to go when I was five. [Laughs]
Miller: Oh wow. So you knew from an early age that you wanted to come here.
Sitzler: My father insisted [on staying in Germany, saying:] “You can’t go until you finish
school, and at least college, because college in the States is not good enough. Here you’re getting
a better education, because they not only educate you in college, but some of the time, for three
months, they put you in a company in your field and you work on every machine and
everything.” You have to see that’s going on, and that’s important because if you want to design
something new, you have to know what can be made, and that’s what we really learned there, in
school. Very good. It was really very helpful. I went to different companies, usually in Berlin.
We had the big companies, and we saw a lot.
Miller: So you had a really practical, hands-on sort of education, as well as the academic part.
Sitzler: Yeah, yeah. So that was the school. It was a private school and Hitler determined then,
in ’38, that finishing in a private school was not good enough. You had to go and finish in a state
5
school or whatever you want to call it. So I had to do another half-year in another school to finish
and get my diploma.
Miller: When you were transferred to the public school or state school – I’ve read or heard about
schools after Hitler was made Chancellor, of the curriculum being more geared towards the
political view that they [the Nazis] were trying to push. Was that your experience or not really?
Sitzler: Not really in Berlin. See, it was a last class before you made your finals, and it was
really a lot of that. Now I didn’t have to go to religion; those classes were for whoever wanted to
go, and we really did not have a class. Now that was in ’38. We did not have a class that really
was like what they had later on, the kind of class where they indoctrinate things in the direction
of the Nazis.
Miller: Right. But you were out of school pretty much by this point, or you were further along.
Sitzler: I really didn’t learn anything new there. There were a couple things that were different
in the way you handled some of the things, but for me it wasn’t a problem that half-year. It went
along real fast. I really didn’t learn much there. It was just the time that I had my six months so I
could graduate.
Miller: Makes sense. So this is ’38 you’re talking about.
Sitzler: Yeah. I might want to tell you, I think, that my parents, my family, were strictly against
Hitler’s [inaudible] thing. We had a lot of Jewish friends, and all the high-up people in Berlin, I
think, they didn’t like what they saw, and they tried anything they could do to stop it or hold it
back.
Miller: Well that’s the other thing I was going to ask you was - this would have been around the
time you were growing up – whether you saw or heard people for or against these sort of changes
in government.
6
Sitzler: No I think basically there was just a small crowd that was for him [Hitler], and those
were the ones. Before Hitler there was a bad time, and there was not much work in Germany,
and when Hitler came he had good ideas. He put them to work, like work service, army; he put
everybody to work. There was no unemployment.
Miller: Right.
Sitzler: So everybody that profited from that liked it. Hey, he did a good job.
Miller: Sure.
Sitzler: That’s what it was, but the people that really knew what was going on really didn’t like
it. It’s a little bit like what you have here now, if you have a president that really [pause] moves
in a different direction.
Miller: Sure.
Sitzler: But no one had any idea that he would start a war in ’38. [‘39]
Miller: So there was really no inkling among the population.
Sitzler: It was just unbelievable for us, that it turned around that fast.
Miller: Wow. OK, so it was really just a real surprise that the war started with Poland and
everything.
Sitzler: Yeah, it was a surprise to most people because there was really no reason. It didn’t make
any sense! To us it didn’t make any sense. There was no reason to divide up Poland. There was
no advantage there. Maybe someone thought, oh we have more land, we can employ more
people, but to me and to our family it didn’t make any sense.
Miller: That’s definitely interesting. Just to go back to your experience in the army, you were
saying you were inducted into a tank battalion.
Sitzler: Yeah.
7
Miller: So you had sort of gone into the training. How exactly did you get involved with that?
You had to? It was required?
Sitzler: Yeah. After you have your initial two months of training in the army, you had to decide.
They had many many things you could do. You could go to train other people, learn how to train
other people, you could work with the guns, with regular guns, you could be in charge of the
maintenance, and they would train you in that respect. I think they probably knew I was a real
good driver. I got my driving license at fifteen so I could drive to school and so I had a lot of
experience. I don’t know how much data they had, but they found out that I was the best they
had for training the tanks.
Miller: You were a good driver from an early age?
Sitzler: Yeah.
Miller: If you can tell me a little bit about that that would be interesting.
Sitzler: The school was about sixteen miles away from the house and I had three ways to go: one
by the electric train, one by the bus, one by the subway, and one by the streetcar. But they were
all fifty minutes to get to school. If I took my bicycle, I could do it in fifteen minutes, go the back
way, where they had no trains. It was a shortcut, kind of. So I always went – when the weather
was reasonable – I went to school with the bicycle, and in winter than wasn’t always fun.
Miller: Sure.
Sitzler: So, we had a car all along, and we went to Sweden with the car, and my father always let
me drive. I guess I was eleven or twelve. I had already taken the car out of the garage, and I
learned real quick. So by fifteen, my father said he could arrange that I could make a special test
so that I could get a driver’s license.
Miller: Oh wow.
8
Sitzler: So I got a driver’s license. I was fifteen. Then I could drive to school. I got a little DKW.
I don’t know – it was a plywood car.
Miller: Oh, really?
Sitzler: It was fun. It had a two-cylinder engine in there, a two cycle. It ran real good. You got
good mileage out of it.
Miller: Yeah, I’d imagine so.
Sitzler: Yeah, it was blue. They made it out of plywood, and then they put a cover over it that
was watertight, you know, like [touching the tablecloth], like this stuff here.
Miller: OK, so something to keep the rain off it and everything.
Sitzler: Yeah, it was nice.
Miller: Was it common for children or kids to drive in those days?
Sitzler: No. I guess they had some cases where people that went to school had no other way.
See, we didn’t have [school] buses or anything. You had to walk or take a train or anything. In
Berlin it was good because we had a lot of different ways to go, but to the railroad station I had
fifteen minutes to go. You could almost go with a bike the same time. [Chuckles] Actually the
bus was the closest to go, but that went to the center of the city and then out to the schools, so it
was a long ride. With the streetcar it was basically the same. It was a little shorter, but the
streetcar was much slower than the bus. The subway was ten minutes to go there [to the station],
but it didn’t go directly to school. It went to the zoo, and then I had another ten minutes to walk,
so it wasn’t good either. [Chuckles]
Miller: So the car and the bike were pretty much the quickest way.
Sitzler: That was it, yeah. That was good.
9
Miller: So it makes sense that they put you in the tank corps, because they knew that you had
experience driving.
Sitzler: Yeah, they had all the records I’m sure. I really enjoyed it. It was interesting. It was a
whole different way than driving [a car], because you had sticks for going right and left, and you
had to really watch out because, the first ones – the Number One tanks – if there was a stone or
something, it threw the chain off.
Miller: The chain on the tread?
Sitzler: Yeah. That was a heavy thing you know. It weighed probably 400 pounds or something.
Miller: Wow.
Sitzler: It took a job to put it on, so we had to really learn how to drive so that you don’t get in
any trouble. [Chuckles]
Miller: So they were teaching you how to drive and how to repair them if they broke.
Sitzler: Yeah. Oh yeah. In the army we had nobody special. We had just the driver, and the
loader, and the commander for the tanks, but no special people for service. I guess in the larger
areas there were some, but the company didn’t have anybody, so we had to take care of the tank.
Miller: Just a question I had that I’ve been wondering about: you were a Lieutenant?
Sitzler: Yeah, later on.
Miller: Oh, later on. OK.
Sitzler: Much later on. I guess ’43.
Miller: OK. When we get there that would definitely be an interesting story to learn. But for
right now, you were training with the tanks and you said you went into Poland in September of
’39.
Sitzler: Yeah.
10
Miller: OK. How was that experience? I mean, was your role actually operating the tank in that
action or were you more sort of just helping to load and unload?
Sitzler: I was in charge of loading and unloading, but I had a tank, so if it would have gone into
the war, I would have been in a tank, driving.
Miller: Right, OK. How did it seem when you went it? Did you hear anything from I guess what
would be the front lines? Did it seem like it was an easy thing to do, or did it seem more difficult
– the whole operation?
Sitzler: Driving the tank you mean?
Miller: I guess in general, as a whole. Sorry.
Sitzler: Oh, you’re getting into France now. In Poland we had no action.
Miller: Oh! OK.
Sitzler: We just unloaded them and we loaded them and put them back on.
Miller: And that was pretty much it.
Sitzler: There was no fighting, no shooting, no nothing, but in France we had to go through, you
know, the French had the Maginot Line, defense line, and we had to break through that line and
there was a lot of driving and fighting. It was really interesting. At that time I was the second in
the tank that had to command. On top. I did the communications and the loading of the gun, but
with the commander on top we never did shoot. He was just getting things going. It was real
interesting, because we got to the Maginot Line and we had foot soldiers in front. We came
behind. We were supposed to clean out any spots where the infantry got any shooting from, so
we stopped at one place and the commander told me: “I have to go out and talk to the
commander of the infantry soldiers, foot soldiers, because they have to do a certain thing. They
11
have to go in a certain direction.” So he left. We were sitting there and we were without a
commander. We were not allowed to drive or do anything.
Miller: Right.
Sitzler: And after a while sitting there, I heard that there was some shooting going on, because it
went right over our tank, but you can’t see much on the side window. Way up on the hill there
was a house, a farmer’s house, and I couldn’t see anything else. It didn’t take long before there
came another shot.
Miller: Sorry, is this rifle fire, or is this tanks?
Sitzler: No, no, an anti-tank gun I think.
Miller: Oh wow.
Sitzler: It’s a big three-and-a-half centimeter – that would be an inch-and-a-half.
Miller: Oh wow, OK.
Sitzler: And nothing; I couldn’t see anything, and the next one hit right in the side of the tank,
and on the sides we had the ammunition stored. So what happened was [that] it ignited the
ammunition, and it started burning. So I went out of the way and I found a little hole there I
guess, where a grenade had hit, and I lay in there and watched. I could see out of the second
story of the farmhouse, in the window, that’s where they had the gun shooting at the tank, and it
kept shooting, but there was nothing to do because the tank [had] burned already. [Chuckles]
Miller: Right, so you couldn’t fire back or anything.
Sitzler: But then I decided that this was not a good place and I went back, and from there on I
had no tank.
Miller: So what happened?
12
Sitzler: So we got one of those French little all-terrain, what would you call them? That can go
through all the ditches and things – it was like that. Like a Jeep, you know?
Miller: Sure.
Sitzler: But it was special. It had special wheels in the middle so that you wouldn’t get stuck
over a hill or something like that. It was a real nice car and from then on I followed the company
in that car.
Miller: Because your tank was out of commission.
Sitzler: Once in a while we stopped and we got some salt, and in a store I found a big piece of
cheese and that’s what we ate. We kept going and going and going, but no more fighting. The
French all came up. They all wanted to be taken care of and fed. [Chuckles]
Miller: Right. OK. So that was fairly easy.
Sitzler: There was not more fighting. We went all the way into the South, almost to the
Mediterranean and that was the end of the war [in France]. We stayed there almost a month in
Grenoble, and then I got the charge to load the tanks up for going home. So we had the same
problem [as Poland] again: they didn’t have a good place [to load the tanks onto the trains]. So
we had to build the ramp first and I loaded all the tanks, and we got an engine and it took off. I
had my job done. So I went with a little French car. I went home to the [inaudible].
Miller: So loading the tanks – you’re talking about building ramps. Tell me about that. How did
you build them? What were they made of?
Sitzler: What you had to do was you had to build two areas strong enough so the tanks would
carry on. If you had planks, you know, wood that thick, you probably needed two to three layers
to put them on, but you also had to support them on the bottom, so you had to either put dirt on
there or stone or gravel or something like that, so you could get up to the height [of the train
13
cars]. You could drive the tank all the way through. Once you had them on the first car you could
drive them all the way through.
Miller: Across the cars.
Sitzler: They were long, yeah. Let me see, they had those, what are they called, [unintelligible]
on there. [Holding hands about a foot apart] The cars were only that far apart.
Miller: You could just drive them right on there.
Sitzler: Drive over.
Miller: Had you ever been out of Germany before this? You said you’d been to Sweden?
Sitzler: Oh we were all over the globe, yeah. We summered. My father had off four or five
weeks and we went to another country: Sweden, Norway, Finland, England, a lot of times in
France, to Spain, to Italy, very little to the East. We went never to Poland, but we went to
Greece, Turkey, and Africa, so I learned a lot.
Miller: You were quite well-traveled by this point then.
Sitzler: Yeah.
Miller: What did do that you were able [to travel]?
Sitzler: My father came back from the war, the First World War, and he started law. He got a
place in Berlin under [2nd President of Germany, Paul von] Hindenburg to write the laws for the
country.
Miller: Oh wow.
Sitzler: So I saw him sitting at his desk every day until eleven o’clock, so that’s why I didn’t
want to be a [lawyer]. [Both chuckle]
Miller: Looked like a lot of work, yeah.
14
Sitzler: Desk work! All the time he had to write, desk work, and phone, and that’s what I didn’t
like. I liked to get out and do something.
Miller: You wanted to work more in the field and sort of, hands-on.
Sitzler: Yep, but he did a good job on that [his work]. He got promoted. He was the
Ministerialdirektor, which is right on the top of what you can get before you – all the different
areas, law, police, they all had a boss, that’s where he was.
[At this point, I asked for the spelling of Ministerialdirektor, which Mr. Sitzler provided, before
continuing the interview.]
Sitzler: Yeah, and he had a specialty. He could take care of if they had strikes. When they had a
strike in Germany – at that time, in the ‘30s there were always strikes here and there – he always
had a way to settle them. So they found out here in the United States, and they called him over
here to settle the coal strike.
Miller: Oh wow, really?
Sitzler: So they knew him over here very well, and they worked with him quite a bit, and he was
over here, oh, four or five times, and he never took me along, but my grandmother told me all the
good things about the United States.
Miller: Well you said you [had] wanted to go since you were five.
Sitzler: Yeah.
[At this point in the interview I attempted to clarify which coal strike Mr. Sitzler’s father had
helped to settle. Mr. Sitzler was unsure, but indicated that he thought it occurred during the late
1920s or early 1930s.]
Miller: Well that’s definitely an interesting story. He [Mr. Sitzler’s father] sounds very
successful. Very interesting. Back to the war. You had just come home from France.
15
Sitzler: Yeah, yeah. I came home from France and we had nothing much to do except we got a
new set of tanks – the bigger one, the Number Three – so we had to again learn the maintenance
and the driving and the guns and everything. That’s what we really did in the ‘40s. Now, I got a
special assignment in May of ’41. I didn’t know what it was. They sent me out to the East Sea, to
[inaudible], and nobody said anything [about] what it was. There were probably 40 or 50 people
there, and we had some tanks, but they were old ones – not the real old ones but the second,
Number Two tanks, and what they did there [was that] they made those tanks watertight. They
put special stuff in there, and they put special exhaust in there that could go up.
Miller: Sort of like a snorkel?
Sitzler: And they worked on it. I was there, and I had to drive the tank underwater, and I had to
see if there were leaks or what were problems. It [the tank] didn’t work. [The water was] about
fifteen meters deep and that was all nice sand up there. The East Sea, it’s a nice gradual beach, so
we drove around in there and they fixed everything when there was a problem that had to be
fixed, and after, I guess it was three weeks, we were finished. Later on, I met one of those other
guys that was in charge there, and he told me that they tried to use those watertight tanks to get
into England. Nobody knew, and I guess nobody knows now, but they took some over there – he
didn’t know exactly, two or three tanks – at night and they dropped them close to the English
coast, and they wanted to see if it worked.
Miller: That is really interesting.
Sitzler: It didn’t work, because there’s no sand. It’s all mud and dirt there and all old, you know,
what the people put in, the trash they put in and [it] tears stuff, and the tanks couldn’t even go ten
meters.
Miller: Wow.
16
Sitzler: They were stuck! So [they] had to lift them back up, put them on the ship, and get them
back home.
Miller: Wow.
Sitzler: But I heard. Never saw anything, never anybody talked about it. It was completely
secret. But they used them later on, in Russia, to go through the – you know they had the Tiger
tank.
Miller: Right.
Sitzler: Which was too heavy; it was no good at all. I could have told them that, but they thought
they needed a big tank. Weighed 50 tons unloaded, 60 [with] load, and there was just no bridge
in Russia you could go over.
Miller: They were too heavy.
Sitzler: Then they used it there, for those tanks – to watertight them – so they could go through
the river. Now, they had to make sure they found a place where the sides weren’t too steep so
they could go back up, but they always found a place, and they had quite a few, I guess. 25 or 50
tanks they had there, that could go through and secure the area on the other side, and then you
could get the army and everything through there. Everything else we could get over the bridge,
but first they had to secure it with the tanks.
Miller: Right, and you drove some of these experimental tanks underwater.
Sitzler: Yeah.
Miller: How did you react when they told you you had to drive a tank underwater?
Sitzler: Oh it was interesting. I had to feel that with all that air in the tank, it wouldn’t have
enough weight to really [sink], but it went. On the sand it would go right through. It was good,
17
but no one was supposed to say anything, nobody said anything. It was completely quiet until
they did it in Russia. Then it came out.
Miller: And this special assignment, was there any particular reason, do you know, why you
were chosen for this, or do you not know?
Sitzler: Because I was the – kind of tank expert. All the tanks – they got me sometimes in the
factory, to check things out they were going to do, see if that would be alright, and there was a
lot of construction going on when they made those new tanks, because people wanted to make it
so it’s easy to build. But sometimes that was not the way to do it for the tank to be handy and
drive, so I went there a couple times and talked to them. I think they knew me. That’s why they
sent me out, but they didn’t say anything [about] why they sent me out. [Chuckles]
Miller: [Chuckles] They just sent you.
Sitzler: And I had to sign up, and promise that I would never tell to anybody about what we did
and why we did it.
[Here Mr. Sitzler paused to collect his thoughts, and began to discuss his life after the underwater
tank experiments.]
I wanted to go to college, and I wanted to get off the army, and they told me that now they had a
decision: they needed me, and now they wanted me to make me an officer. I hated that, because
that meant that I was stuck, but they said I had to go, no matter if I said no. You had to go, you
[striking table] must, OK? So it was real interesting. We had the officers’ school in Berlin, and I
really enjoyed it. They made some new, interesting things to learn, and they made some things
that you could use in the war. They gave you instructions to go at night to certain points and
come back, and you had to use those instructions. So they told you, go left one mile to a tree, and
then go along the street, and then there’s a checkpoint. There was a piece of paper, and you could
18
just sign it up, and then the instructions kept on going: go right, go left, go over the bridge and it
told you, but it wasn’t always real easy. So we had those five points, and for me, oh that was
interesting! And I signed all five points, and I got home in, oh, I guess two hours.
Miller: And was that fast?
Sitzler: And you know, there were 60 people in my officers’ class. I was the only one that got all
six points. [Chuckles]
Miller: Wow. Very good.
Sitzler: But that’s why I really enjoyed it. That was interesting, because that was the first time I
had ever had to use written directions that told me certain points to find and go around.
Miller: And so you enjoyed that part of the course?
Sitzler: So that was the last thing I did. I was one degree under-officer then, when I left the
school. [I] went back to the company. At that time they had started the war in Africa, and they
had to get tanks over there, and for some reason they said, “Oh, you’re the expert; we have a
trainload of tanks. You have to get them to Africa.” So I got to where they make the tanks in
Mecklenburg and we loaded them. I had three helpers and we loaded them on the train, which
there was real easy – they had a ramp – and we drove them right on and got two engines, and
went up to the mountains, through the Alps. On top of the Alps, we were supposed to get a third
engine, because there was a lot of braking power going down the mountain. The Italians or
whoever was supposed to do it didn’t get a third engine. I called back and said, “I can’t go. I
don’t have [the engine].” They said, “Forget the third engine! We need the tanks in Africa! Go!”
[Strikes table]
Miller: Wow.
19
So we went down the Alps with two engines, and it was going fast around the curves and faster,
and I was hanging on the outside ready to jump off, on the mountainside in case.
Miller: In case it fell over.
Sitzler: But it was my scariest moment in my whole life! But they made it. I guess the tanks
were heavy enough [that] it stayed on the track. We got down to Napoli [Naples, Italy], and
that’s where we had to load the tanks on the ship, and that was a tough job – took us almost a
week to get them all on. We had to use the crane, and they had to go in the hold, and then you
had to drive them, and then you had to put something on, and then you put a second one [tank]
on top. It was a tough job, you know? They didn’t have enough room there to put them all in.
The ship wasn’t big enough. But we got them on after a week and I thought, “Oh gee, now I can
go home,” because I wanted to get married. We had it all scheduled for December and that’s
when I had that trip, so we couldn’t marry.
Miller: So when exactly did you meet your wife? Was this before the war?
Sitzler: No, it would have been when I came back from France.
Miller: OK.
Sitzler: In ’42.
Miller: And how did that happen? How did you meet her?
Sitzler: Oh, we came back and we made a parade through the town, with the tanks, and all the
girls were throwing flowers off, and my wife was standing on the side, and I had to find out
where she was [from], and she said, “I work in the pharmacy.” So we were “hooked up.”
Miller: Wow, cool, OK. And so now in ’42, you had decided to get married and you had to go
back.
20
Sitzler: Yeah, I had to ask special vacation to get married really, but then came that transport for
the tanks, and that was more important, so we couldn’t marry in December, but I was ready to go
home in December to get married, but my assignment was to get the ships, the tanks, to Africa,
not just load them on the ship. So the ships went out and they had air-alarm, airplanes oben
[over]. They [the ships] went right back in the harbor. They were out at night, and the airplanes,
they came back. It took two-and-a-half weeks before we found one night, where there was
enough cloud and fog that we could get anything over, so I was sitting there [chuckles] wanting
to get married. But, then we had them over and I went back and we got married, I guess, a couple
days later.
Miller: Oh OK, so not too late. That’s good.
Sitzler: It worked out.
Miller: Good. And these airplanes you were talking about –
Sitzler: Yeah, the English fighter planes, oh yeah, they tried to keep it – it was hard to get
anything over there, because the Mediterranean is usually nice weather. Sunshine, blue skies,
you know. There’s no way anybody could go over. They had to do it at night, and they had those
lights on the plane, on the bottom. They could light up and they could really shoot, you know. So
it was not easy. So we got to Italy, yeah. Then I had vacation and I got married. We went to the
mountains and had a wonderful time, in Bregenz [in Austria]. Bregenz is right – it’s on a big
lake, and it’s right on the mountains. It’s a beautiful area.
Miller: Were you there with your wife, or was that for the army, when you were there?
Sitzler: With my wife. For vacation. For the honeymoon vacation.
Miller: Right. OK, well it’s good they let you do that at least.
21
Sitzler: And then, when I got back, they sent me to Russia. I guess this was when they had the
big offensive going on, and the tanks and the company and everything was already down there. I
didn’t have to load them. Someone else took care of it, because I was on vacation, so they sent
me by train to catch up with the company, and I caught them close to the Krim [Crimea, Russia],
which is halfway into Russia. I had five tanks under me, and took care of it. We drove down for,
I guess, three, three-and-half weeks. Every day we drove through Russia. We went over the big
bridge by the Don River, [near] Rostov, and then it was all countryside. Beautiful. There were
fields that were probably 20 miles long, and they had watermelons, and you should have heard
the sound when the tank goes over the watermelons! [Miller chuckles] But, we went through
there. See, down there they have a different way. Nobody has any ground. All they have is a
house, but nothing belongs to them on the ground. And then they have a place somewhere in the
center where they have all their machinery for the fields. So people from everywhere come to the
machinery in the morning, six o’ clock, and go to the field and work on the field, and at four o’
clock, they put the thing back, and they go back home. That’s the way it works, and it works
beautifully because all those fields, they were just beautiful. Everything was in gross [held in
common] and really nice. So we went through all that and the people were all welcoming us.
“Hey, finally we’re rid of the Soviets!” They all hated them down there.
Miller: So they were actually happy [to see the Germans].
Sitzler: Soon as you got past the Don River in the South, they all hated the Soviets, and so they
brought us drinks, and they invited us into the home and they cooked for us. It was really nice.
So we went all the way to the Caucasian Mountains, and there we stopped, because they had to
get ready for going to Stalingrad, and that had to be all organized. So we were there for quite a
while, and they had some army there in the next city, but we had free going on the land, you
22
know? We had our own place there. We had a tank corps there, but I was only taking care of one
company basically. I had a company sent down there. But when it went to loading tanks or doing
something I was in charge of, I was in charge of all the four companies that belonged to a
division. And the Russians had little airplanes I guess, [that] they took away from people that
were rich, and they put some hand grenades in there and they went at night whenever [they] saw
something downstairs, or there were woods – they didn’t have many woods there but they
figured, “oh there’s [some Germans]” – they threw hand grenades down.
Miller: Wow. From the planes.
Sitzler: From the plane, yeah. So we found out and we heard a couple [inaudible] not too far
away, so what we did is, we took the tank and drove it away, and we dug a big hole just wide
enough so the tracks would fit on each side, and we dug it deep enough and put some straw in
there, and some blankets, and drove the tank over, and now we were – at night we were safe. We
slept under the tank. [Chuckles]
Miller: Under the tank, right.
Sitzler: So that was real good. We had a safe place at night and we had a good time at day. It
was wonderful down there. It was beautiful weather and the people were nice, and then some day
we had a guy that took care of the supplies, and, I don’t know, he must have been a little dumb.
He put the gasoline in one of the little Wald – forest strips, you know? They just had small
pieces. He put all the gasoline storage in there.
Miller: Oh wow.
Sitzler: Oh wow. He didn’t know. He didn’t find out until they threw a hand grenade in there
and the whole gasoline [supply] went up.
Miller: Oh man.
23
Sitzler: So we went by horse and buggy.
Miller: Wow. [Both chuckle]
Sitzler: We went for a couple weeks. We went by horse and buggy.
Miller: Because that was – all your gas was blown up.
Sitzler: Yeah, we had to save the little gas that was in the tanks, you know, for getting them
going somewhere. And the next thing was, you know, Stalingrad didn’t work out, and we had to
hurry to load up the trains, [get] the tanks on the train, because otherwise we would have been
cut off. It was a rush! Everybody rushed out, back, and I was in charge of loading. I had a BMW
with a sidecar, so I was pretty handy, and I loaded all the tanks. I had one guy with me for a
while, and I loaded all the tanks with him, and as I had all the tanks in, he went with somebody
else. I guess there was someone else waiting, and he went, and I went with my bicycle with a
sidecar, and the train went off, and I had my job done. So I went back to the Don River across a
big bridge to Rostov. Took quite a while driving with a motorcycle, so [I thought,] “the train
should come pretty soon.” Train didn’t come. Nothing, train didn’t come. Guy came to me and
said, “We have to blow the bridge.” I said, “The train is coming. You can’t blow the bridge.
There’s everything on there, all the tanks and all our stuff.” He said [pounding table], “I have
orders. At three o’ clock, the bridge goes up!” And at three o’ clock, the bridge went up. We had
no tanks. We had no supplies. Nothing. We had just our own – well I had the sidecar. [Chuckles]
Miller: Right, you had that. So was this bridge the way out?
Sitzler: Over the Don River, yeah. Huge river, you know. It’s like here, the Chesapeake Bay
Bridge, you know? It’s a long bridge. And, what happened we found out later on – the Russians
aren’t dumb, they know, “Oh, the train comes with the tanks” – they cut all the water pipes off
that, you know, they have the special things that go to put water in the engine?
24
Miller: Right. Yes.
Sitzler: And they cut all the water lines. So the train got within seven miles of the bridge and ran
out of water.
Miller: Wow, so he couldn’t get there.
Sitzler: That’s what we heard later on. So we were without tanks, so we went back to the
garrison.
Miller: And how organized, generally, was this retreat?
Sitzler: It was really well organized. Everything. The trucks went, and the people went, and
everything. The kitchen. Everything was real organized, and everyone made it, and the tanks
would have made it if – the water. And nobody realized that the Russians would do that, because
we could have probably got [a] couple gallons on the train if we had had any idea! But that was a
surprise. OK, now we are back [from Russia], and I had vacation.
Miller: Where did you spend that?
Sitzler: Oh let me see where we went. We went to the Alps, to Garmish.
[At this point, Mr. Sitzler spent a few minutes clarifying the location of Garmish, Germany, a
town about 40 miles north of Munich in the Bavarian Alps.]
Then I got home, and I got promoted to an officer, and I was sent down there to the S.S. [who]
had trouble with the Tiger Tanks. They were too heavy, and they could not drive them real well,
and if the Tiger Tank threw a chain, they couldn’t put it back on. Either they weren’t trained, or
they – I don’t know what. They didn’t want to – you know, it was usually in the mud, it was a
dirty job, and I guess they weren’t used to that. They had their fancy uniforms, so they sent me to
check that out, and it was tough. They just weren’t strong. They just didn’t want to do dirty
work, and I was supposed to train a special group so that once [the] tank was stuck, the group
25
could go there with a bicycle or motorcycle or something and fix it up. I showed them how to do
it, and it was not easy. You had to lay out the chain, but you had to clean it first. You couldn’t
have all the mud there. Oh, they hated that job! They had to get brushes and clean them out, OK?
And then they had to drive the tank with one chain working, but with the one chain working, the
tank has a tendency to go. So you had to be able to brake to turn it a little bit that way [indicating
the motion of a tank turning with hand signals] and then go a little bit. They couldn’t do that.
Miller: The S.S. couldn’t?
Sitzler: They were not capable! They didn’t have the feel for it you know? And as soon as you
were halfway on the tank and you turned a little bit – too much! It was off again. And I tried, I
tried. I showed them. I drove the tank on there. I had a guy in there with me, and I showed him:
you go a little bit, easy, and then you push so it stays. Didn’t work. So I said I had my job done
and I went back home. [Both chuckle]
Miller: Just going back slightly, you said you were promoted after you came back from Russia.
Sitzler: Yeah.
Miller: And was there a reason for that, or was it just because you’d been to officers’ school?
Sitzler: It was time, you know? In the promotions you go a certain time every year. In the
beginning it’s every year you get promoted. First [you have your] regular soldier, then your
Gefreiter, then your Obergefreiter, your Feldwebel, then your Unteroffizier, then your -
Feldwebel we call it, and then you get Lieutenant you know? [Gefreiter and Obergefreiter are
German military ranks that correspond roughly with the American ranks of Private and Senior
Lance-Corporal respectively. Both Feldwebel and Unteroffizier can be roughly equated with
American sergeants.] So it’s granted – automatically they do it – unless you’re not doing your
job. That’s different.
26
Miller: Sure.
Sitzler: So I got promoted. [Here Mr. Sitzler paused to collect his thoughts, and briefly returned
to his experiences in Russia.] We were there in an area where again they were throwing hand
grenades, and we had the Panzers, the three tanks – I guess they supplied new tanks to it [the
company] – and one morning, we were not even – it was past the Krim, it was close to the front –
and one morning I was in the tank and I guess we were going to go somewhere, and I was
looking around at everybody there, ready to go. Somehow, I guess it must have been a hand
grenade, might have been something else, we never could really say, but it was an explosive that
hit the tank, and the top of the tank where the commander stands has two openings you know?
And it hit under that opening, and the opening flew right on my head, and I was down in the tank
and I was out. I guess not too long, but I was really hit. So they put me on the ambulance, and
they sent me back to Germany, and I went to a hospital in Brieg, which is, oh about, 80 miles
southeast of Berlin [Brzeg, Poland, 150 miles southeast of Berlin]. They had a real hospital, not a
field hospital there.
Miller: How was the hospital?
Sitzler: Oh it was a nice hospital. They had [a] clean, nice hospital, and they took care of me. I
had a concussion, and I had something else. I had some kind of a cold or something. So my wife
visited me there and I guess I was there, in the hospital for three [or] some weeks, in Brieg. That
was in ’43, February of ’43, and at that time they sent me back to the garrison and I did a couple
things there, getting things organized, because they were – they didn’t tell us – but they were
preparing, getting ready for the front in France you know? They already knew that they [the
Allies] were going to come sooner or later. So in fall of ’43, we were all ready. Everything was
27
brought up to date, and packed, and we went over the Rhine River right close to the border line
into – oh it was a nice little town. All the soldiers were put into quarters in private people’s
[properties]. I was in a bakery, and the tanks were all hidden away somewhere, and we stayed
there quite a while. We stayed there. My parents came visiting me, and we stayed there almost –
yeah, I guess until the invasion. I guess they had little advance notice, so about one day or two
days before that, we went into France with the tanks and all the supplies, but I was put in charge
of the supply company. They didn’t have anybody there, and the supply was going to be very
difficult, so they felt that [Sitzler’s] the right guy to do it, and I couldn’t understand. I had
nothing to do with the tanks anymore; I had a supply company, and I had to make sure that the
supplies and the gasoline got to the tanks, and the tanks raced to the invasion front.
Miller: And you said that people were aware this [the invasion] was coming?
Sitzler: Yeah.
Miller: OK.
Sitzler: Yeah, they did. I guess not much. A couple days. They knew it was coming, but the real
– what day they didn’t know until the day before, something like that, you know?
Miller: Had you personally been hearing about things happening? That this might happen?
Sitzler: No, no. We really didn’t know, we [only] had a feeling, because nobody knew where
you [the Americans] were coming, you know? You could come into southern France, you could
come near Holland, you could come into Germany. So nobody really had any idea what was
going to happen, but then the first [German] tanks were about 40 or 50 miles [away]. We sent out
28
the trucks with gasoline and food, and it worked pretty good, but then they were 100 miles, and
we found out we couldn’t send anything out at daytime because there were airplanes all the time.
MIGs going around. So we had to send them at night, but the roads there were not really good.
They were all side roads, you know, and the trucks couldn’t put any lights on, so we had trouble.
They got off the road, and they couldn’t find the drive, and we had trouble getting the supplies,
and the next time it was ever further, so I sent out sixteen trucks, and eleven came back. So we
had trouble getting supplies out. I went out with a jeep and tried to find them, but they got lost,
or they – I don’t know. Maybe they didn’t want to go. You never know. But for the next time,
next night, it was even further were the tanks were. They went out, and four came back.
Miller: Out of the eleven?
Sitzler: [Chuckles in affirmation]
Miller: OK.
Sitzler: So I didn’t know. I couldn’t get more trucks. I couldn’t feed the tanks. Nothing I could
do. I went to Paris, to see if they were at the headquarters, see if we could get any trucks
anywhere or they could confiscate some or what we could do to get supplies for it, and they were
already there, they were already more or less packing up, and they were all disturbed. There was
no organization anymore. Everything went haywire.
Miller: Did they think they were going to be overrun basically?
Sitzler: Yeah, you were in already, probably. They had already found out the defense didn’t
work. You were in. It was only a matter of days, and you were there. The all had packed up and
29
bosses were all gone. So there was nothing I could do. I went home and I didn’t send those three
trucks out anymore. I said, “OK, nothing I can do.” Now the company tanks came back, some of
them. I don’t know why. Maybe because they had no ammunition or they had no gasoline, you
know, something. But, they came back, and we got organized close to the Rhine River. We got
back together there. We had twenty, twenty-two tanks there, and my three trucks, and some other
vehicles, some Lieutenants and some people, and the commander of the division. There was
really nothing to do right there, so I told the commander, “I have my wife in Berlin, and the
Russians are getting close. I have to get out.” So he gave me vacation, and I went to Berlin, and
picked up all the stuff we had there and put in on the train, and we went towards Stuttgart. That’s
where my parents were. We had only one big problem: they had bombed the bridge, and the train
could only go to the bridge, and we had to go to the next station on the other side by car, so we
had to load the car and get out and get to the other station and load the train again. But it worked.
The train took us to Stuttgart, and I unloaded everything, and we got everything to my parents,
and my wife stayed there and I went back to the army. And what happened [was that] it was hard
to get transportation. I went with the train a stretch, but over the Rhine River the bridges
wouldn’t work so I tried to hitchhike. I hitchhiked on the Autobahn and a nice car stopped and
asked me where I wanted to go, and I said, “Oh I want to go to the 3rd Panzer Division. They are
located up there.” And you know, the people in there had an S.S. uniform, and I said, “OK, that’s
OK,” and they said, “OK, we’ll take you there.” I found out in the car in the back there was a
new commander for the 3rd [Panzer] tank division.
Miller: This was an official car?
30
Sitzler: That was an official car, yeah, but it didn’t have a flag or anything on there. So we went
there, and I found a couple of old people from the regiment, and they told me, “Come quick,
come quick! We have all the discharge papers in the garage.” Our commander was discharged,
and they put someone new in there. They didn’t know it was an S.S. guy, but he gave discharge
papers to everybody, to the whole division. So I went to the garage there – it was a barn – and
they had a big stack, and I got my discharge papers and I said, “OK, it’s time to leave,” and went
back to Stuttgart, and that was the end of the fight. The French came first, and they did shoot
down – they were afraid – they did shoot down into the center of Stuttgart, right over our house,
but nothing happened. One hit the tree, and it went down in the ground, but it didn’t explode. We
had to remove it later on. [Chuckles]
Miller: Wow. That must have been kind of scary.
Sitzler: But then Americans came later on and they put big signs on the trees. “Any soldiers
should come down for discharge.” So I went down, and they had captured one of the German
division’s money, German money, and everybody [who] came down for discharge got 100
Marks.
Miller: Wow! [Both chuckle]
Sitzler: And they [the Americans] were real nice, and I guess we talked for a while, and I said,
“I’m ready to go [to America],” and they said, “We can’t take you along yet.”
Miller: So you wanted to go with them back to the United States.
31
Sitzler: Yeah, at least some way to get things going, but no, and my father said “No, you can’t
go. You can’t go over there. The colleges are not good enough. You have to study here.” So I
was going to college. We had a nice technical college in Stuttgart – I think the best one – but the
bombs had disturbed the roof. There was no roof on there.
Miller: Wow, on the school.
Sitzler: On the building, on the school. So they had a good idea. We went out to an old airport
and they had a big hall there, and we disassembled the roof, and put it on a truck, and took it
down to the University, and put it on.
Miller: Wow. The students did this?
Sitzler: It took four months, so I couldn’t start right way, but in November we started college,
and I went to college four years, four terms, but in ’38, I guess, summer of ’38, the Americans
put a notice in the paper that they had opened a place where you could apply for going to the
states. [It was probably closer to 1948. Mr. Sitzler moved to the United States in 1949.] So I
went down and applied, and I was number four there on the list, and that was good, because I got
the papers for going to the States three months before I finished college.
Miller: That’s not bad.
Sitzler: So I finished college in December. We went to Italy, to Genoa, on the ship and went
over to New York.
[Mr. Sitzler then described his experiences in the United States. He had an uncle in Baltimore,
where a fellow German helped Mr. Sitzler to get a job manufacturing tools for aircraft
32
manufacture at Glen L. Martin. After three years he moved to Mechanicsburg and worked for a
man who ran an independent aluminum door and window manufacturing business. Mr. Sitzler
worked in automation, and told an interesting story about an incident in which a reaction in the
smelter caused an explosion. Three-and-a-half years later the company went bankrupt, and Mr.
Sitzler got a job in a tool shop in Harrisburg, which made connecters for IBM. He worked again
in automation and sales. Mr. Sitzler told an interesting story about his boss, who was apparently
a glider pilot, and often flew from Harrisburg to New York; during a glider pilots’ meeting in
Mexico, he suffered from heat stroke and died. Mr. Sitzler did not wish to run the company,
which was sold to DuPont. (The branch went bankrupt in 2004.) Mr. Sitzler worked as a
consultant for DuPont until retirement. During the time Mr. Sitzler discussed these events, I
asked if there was anything else he wanted to say about the pre-1945 period, to which he replied
in the negative. After he concluded his work experiences, I thanked Mr. Sitzler for talking with
me and briefly discussed my academic major and minor with him before shutting off the digital
recorder. Mr. Sitzler then showed me a binder about the war a friend of his had made for him
which consisted of pictures and timelines concerned with Mr. Sitzler’s division. I was also
shown Mr. Sitzler’s 1939 Soldatbuch and a medal earned by Mr. Sitzler’s father during the First
World War. Mr. Sitzler also mentioned, while the recorder was off, that he was on standby
during Operation Walküre, the 1944 plot in which a group of German officers attempted to kill
Adolf Hitler and take control of the German government with the aim of ending Nazi rule.]